Saturday, November 26, 2016

When we look at history and how it's all unwound
There are few people on the planet that have been more tightly bound

With the liberation of our troubled human race
Than the man from Santiago with the beard upon his face
Dressed in green fatigues that he wore most of his years
As he led his country longer than any of his peers
And few men have been vilified more often in the news
Than Commandante Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz

Born into a country of Dengue and despair
Ruled by foreign armies ever since Columbus got there
He'd reject his privilege and join humanity
Forced to choose between his species and his family
And when legal means had failed to stop the suffering he saw
He decided it was high time to work outside the law
He organized a revolution with the rifle and the fuse
Commandante Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz

When you win a revolution, you might stop when you're ahead
But in the Havana Declaration the revolutionaries said
Wherever people anywhere are found to be oppressed
As long as we have hearts that beat within our chests
It is our duty to support them – and Cuba sent their troops
And Cuba sent their doctors, in ever-larger groups
And their leader was the one in the track suit and running shoes
Commandante Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz

It could have been someone else, and he might be the first to say
The movement makes the leader, not the other way
But around the world right now, sitting at their dinner plates
There are people praising this man who stood up to the United States
And lived life as a beacon for a new society
With housing, healthcare, education and the human right to dignity
Central to the vision for which he stood accused
Commandante Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz

I can't predict the future, but if the past is any indication
Many more will follow the trail of the little Cuban nation
And soon in Havana, I hope that we may see
A statue of the man, to go beside Jose Marti
But wherefore goes Havana, or Angola, Mozambique
I'll always remember the big man's rosy cheeks
If the world could vote for a leader, how many just might choose
Commandante Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz

Tuesday, November 22, 2016

I just heard the dude with the nice midwestern accent, Tim Ryan, say on NPR that since the latest election the Democrats are no longer a national party. Now, he says, the Democrats are a "coastal" party. What a bunch of bullshit. What he is trying to do, in a fairly clumsy manner, is to build this narrative of the Democratic Party as a "resistance movement."

In other words, what was for a century the "party of the white man" -- as it billed itself -- the Democratic Party, the historic party of white supremacy, the party run by rich, white men that claimed to represent the white working class (sound familiar?), is now heading up a bold resistance movement against the very personification of evil, Donald Trump and his racist, sexist, homophobic, "alt right" Republican minions.

The existence of the neofascist president-elect and the existence of white supremacist groups is not in doubt. The question here is what kind of resistance movement Tim Ryan and his Democratic Party intend to mount. I think the answer is clear -- and it's nothing new, but it bears exploration.

I live in one of the supposed bastions of progressivism in the US -- Portland, Oregon. Before I moved to Portland, I lived in other cities with supposedly progressive Democratic mayors and city councils -- Seattle, Olympia, San Francisco, Berkeley, Boston, Somerville, Houston, and still others (like many professional musicians, I've lived a very mobile life).

It is being widely publicized on the corporate (and "public") media that the Republicans control both houses of Congress and almost every governor's mansion in the country. What is somewhat less widely publicized is the fact that now, as usual, the vast majority of US cities are controlled by the Democratic Party. In most cases, US city governments are essentially one-party institutions, where the Republicans don't even bother putting up a fight, since they never win.

And there's a clear pattern in terms of the governance of all of these cities, and it goes like this: the more the rents go up, the more shrill the rhetoric of the ruling Democratic Party politicians get.

And who are they criticizing with such enthusiasm? The real estate speculators and developers who are primarily responsible for the growing misery of so much of their supposed constituencies? The 48 (out of 50) Republican-controlled state governments who have banned rent control in their states?

No. They prefer safe targets. Ones that don't affect the bottom lines of the real estate developers that bought their offices for them. They proclaim their cities to be "sanctuary cities" -- havens for undocumented people, the struggling human beings in our midst that most Republicans still refer to as "illegal aliens." They proudly proclaim their allegiance to human rights, and their intention to continue to refuse to cooperate with federal immigration authorities (not that the Department of Homeland Security actually needs their help in the first place).

Let's unpack this a little. The mayors of Portland, Seattle and other cities say they will not use their own cops to enforce federal law, at least when it comes to immigration law. But whenever they're asked by their struggling constituents -- thousands of whom are homeless in each of these cities, with a hundred million others around the country barely holding on, as wages continue to stagnate as the cost of housing skyrockets -- whether they can institute rent control, they say "sorry, can't do that, that would be breaking state law."

They acknowledge that we are having a rent crisis, a housing crisis, and still suffering from the long-term aftermath of the foreclosure crisis. But they say their hands are tied, nothing much they can do. Other than making it easier for the developers to build more "low-income" housing -- though "low income" never seems to be defined as something lower than the median income, which would be the sensible definition of such a term. "Low income" in actual terms means far above the median income. It is Orwellian doublespeak. (And it's not a problem we can build our way out of in the first place.)

And why can we break federal immigration law but not state laws barring rent control? Simple. Because it is undocumented workers who are building these cities. If you live in Portland or Seattle or San Francisco and you're not a hermit, you know this. I'm certainly not going to name names or anything like that, but I know lots of folks from Mexico in this city, and many of them are undocumented. If it were up to me, they'd all be given citizenship immediately, but that's not my point here. The point is, they are all super-exploited workers. Most of them are working at least two full-time jobs in order to make ends meet. They hardly ever sleep.

What kind of work do they do? There is a massive boom in building mansions and other high-income housing across this city (and so many other cities). By my informal estimation as someone who walks around Portland avidly, most of the people building these buildings are from Mexico or Central America. If their legal status reflects the legal status of the Mexicans I know well enough to have learned what their immigration status is, then most of them are undocumented. Mexicans I know who are not in the construction industry are working in warehouses or on factory assembly lines (yes, there are lots of factories making things in Portland -- everything from windows and doors to hoses for nuclear reactors). I don't think I know a single white US citizen who works in a factory or in construction in this city.

Undocumented, terribly exploited workers are the backbone of the Portland construction boom. The super-profits being made by the real estate speculators and developers are fueled by illegal immigration. Not that this is unique to the cities -- it's the same in the countryside. The Republicans who govern the farming areas walk a fine line between terrorizing the Spanish-speaking populations in order to keep them in a proper state of fearfulness (so they won't organize a union) -- while not working too hard to get them deported, lest they destroy their local economy by doing so. The farm jobs don't pay well enough for anyone else to do this back-breaking work, you see. At least not since slavery was abolished.

And why not go ahead and break state law and impose some desperately-needed legal controls over the cost of housing? Simple. Because these supposedly progressive Democratic politicians don't give a shit about us. They are bought and sold by real estate developers and other rich people, and they govern on behalf of these scum.

In the 1980's, in response to rising property taxes, property owners formed a lobby, and the Reagan administration passed a law that limited the annual rise in property taxes across the country to 1%. Why has such a law never been passed for renters? Because both parties rule on behalf of the (bigger) property owners, not the lowly renters.

The proof is in the pudding. If these politicians cared about the working class, they would immediately break state laws across the country and institute sensible forms of rent control. In doing this, they would become tremendously popular among the working class residents of their cities. They could change the face of the country. And then of course they would become objects of hatred, victims of smear campaigns led by the real estate developers and property speculators who they would have just betrayed.

Portland has lost most of it's African-American population in between the last two censuses, and statistics in San Francisco, Seattle and elsewhere are similar. If these Democratic politicians cared about Black people, they'd institute rent control.

Instead, they'll take what they see as the safe road. They know that most of their constituencies hate Trump and the Republican establishment. They know that most of their constituencies are life-long Democrats with egalitarian impulses, who voted for Obama, who believe in an inclusive society. So they'll focus on things we can all agree on -- racism and sexism and fascism are bad. We stand against these things. What do we stand for? Who the fuck knows. Hope and change, or something. Entrepreneurship. Small business. The middle class, whatever the fuck that is.

But Mexicans, African-Americans, Asians, white people, men and women who are all struggling to make ends meet, who desperately need governments to intervene on their behalf, against the rapacious greed of the landlord class, the big banks, etc.? Fuck them. The mayor of Portland, the mayor of Seattle, the mayor of New York City, the mayor of Boston -- that's what they would be saying if they were honest. Fuck them. We don't give a shit.

Now go protest against Trump and the governor of North Carolina and racism and sexism some more -- just don't pay any attention to the landlord behind the curtain.

Tuesday, November 15, 2016

THE ALBUM:Announcing the release of my new album, Punk Baroque! It's free to stream all you want, but if you can donate or Subscribe, this is very much appreciated. And if you like the music, please share it!
&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;a href="http://davidrovics.bandcamp.com/album/punk-baroque"&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;Punk Baroque by David Rovics&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/a&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;

THE TOUR:The spring tour includes Canada, California, Denmark, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, the Netherlands, England, Scotland and Wales. Your help promoting a gig that's in your area would be appreciated immensely. You can tell folks about the gig(s), share this blog post or my website by whatever means, and you can print out this tour poster, fill in the local gig details, and put up copies anywhere you see fit! No permission needed to help promote a show... Here are some more ideas on DIY tour promotion.

Monday, November 14, 2016

The sidewalks, living rooms and Facebook pages are full of recriminations, insults, self-doubt, soul-searching, and stuff like that, much more now than usual in these United States. (And even other places, too.) I doubt anybody reading this isn't already way too familiar with the phenomenon, as of last week, if not before then.

Understandably enough, many people are feeling responsible, guilty, worried, sickened, and other negative things, for all kinds of different reasons, depending. In familiar and unfamiliar ways, from those in the highest political offices to folks living under the bridges, the questions of class, race and gender are being pitted against each other, and now everybody seems to be screaming (either that or they literally are screaming).

What we had was an impossible situation, in terms of this election -- on one side, a Nazi appealing to the "the forgotten class." On the other side, Wall Street. The Nazi won, even though Wall Street got more votes. (The more sensible options weren't, because this is the USA and we don't really do democracy.)

So now what?

Someone on Facebook left a snarky comment (the normal tone lately, across the political spectrum, it seems) after a post relating to Trump's victory, that "at least you'll profit from it." I wish that were the case, but that's not how it actually works, from my experience.

But it somehow seems like a nice launch pad for what I wanted to say here. That is, when you look at history, as I am wont to do, you find that what really makes big changes in just about any society, very much including the US, is social movements. Electoral politics just reacts to social movements -- if they're big, militant, ecumenical, and well-organized. Electoral politics responds just as readily to the lack of a social movement as well.

I could illustrate this point with loads of examples, but you can read the good history books yourself if you're interested. (Just ask if you need recommendations.) Point is, we need a big, militant, ecumenical and well-organized social movement, or we're goners.

How do we do that?

From my reading of the history of societies and social movements throughout the world, there is at least one common thread, and that is optimism. The oxygen that social movements breathe is called optimism.

So, to take a recent example of a social movement that was imbued with optimism for a few years or so: at the end of Bill Clinton's second term, a movement took the world stage in the form of the WTO protests in Seattle. It took a few years of having this "New Democrat" in the White House before enough people started to realize that he was basically just like Reagan, except a lot worse, in all the same ways. Then after GW Bush took over, the movement against neoliberalism -- the anticapitalist movement, the "anti-globalization" movement, or whatever you want to call it, continued unabated.

In terms of this primarily pre-9/11, global, egalitarian social movement, it didn't much matter who was in the White House, because it was widely understood that those who ran the show in both ruling parties in the US represented the capitalist elite. (Which was, and is, true.)

The dying gasps of this movement continued for a couple years after 9/11, but for various reasons which I won't go into here, 9/11 was largely responsible for bringing it to an end.

Concurrent with the decline of the anticapitalist movement was the rise of the antiwar movement. This movement more or less ceased to exist in any significant form early in Bush's second term. Bush -- a very vilified Republican president (for very good reasons) -- would still be in power for several years, waging wars around the world, but there would be no large-scale protests against his foreign policy in the US after 2005.

Which is all to say that these movements were not just responses to circumstances. They were responses to "free trade" and imperialism, respectively, for sure -- but there was nothing automatic about these responses happening. They happened because there was a widespread sense of optimism that they could succeed in changing things in concrete ways. The movements had goals, and millions of people involved with both of these movements in one way or another had a sense of optimism that success was possible.

So how do we build a movement like that?

If I or anybody else knew the answer to that question, the world would be a very different place. But one thing is clear to me: the movement doesn't happen unless the optimism is there first. Lots of other things, too -- but essentially, the optimism.

So there's of course a place for beating yourself and your neighbors up when things all go haywire, I suppose. But after all that, what's still needed is a widespread sense of optimism for positive social change to happen, by means of a social movement with a clear set of goals.

No one seems to ever be able to predict where or when these movements will arise. What's clear is they can happen (or not happen) when the White House is staffed by the most progressive or the most reactionary administrations, during times of peace or times of war, during periods of relative prosperity or during a financial crisis. What's also clear is all those other things need to be present -- optimism, inclusiveness, massive size, and lots of people willing to get arrested, beaten, and worse (which is what I mean when I use the term "militant").

Where does optimism come from?

OK, so I don't know. It's always a bit mysterious, in terms of how these things start. If anybody says differently, they're probably running a cult -- or aspiring to run one. What's clear is that once the optimism is there, it has a tendency of building. (Which the powers-that-be understand better than most of us do, so they'll do their best to nip it in the bud in all kinds of very overt and surprisingly underhanded ways when it begins to manifest.)

The reason it has a tendency to build, once it's there, I think, is that an optimistic, inclusive social movement tends to bring with it a sense of community. We humans are tribal animals, and we yearn for that sense of shared purpose (whether we know it consciously or not).

This need for community can be (and often is) exploited by people like Trump or Clinton -- and institutions as diverse as the US military, MTV or General Mills. But this yearning for community can also be answered by egalitarian social movements. (As one of my former bosses once told me when I was young and idealistic, "I joined SDS in college because that's where all the cute guys were.")

So how do we foster that sense of community?

One of the most common ways to foster a sense of community is through music. Playing music together, organizing musical events, concerts, festivals, protests that include lots of music, etc. (As you may know, I play music for a living, so hopefully you'll forgive me for engaging in a bit of inevitable self-promotion here.)

Music can inspire people, in lots of different ways. It can also cure depression, and make you buy a certain kind of cereal as opposed to another one, even though they both taste the same.

Music can teach you things, too. It can teach you that the only things that matter in life are romance, sex and narcissism (which is what you'll learn if you watch enough MTV). Or it can teach you about historical events, social movements, methods of organizing, and lots of other useful things -- and it can do that without you even knowing that you're learning about all of those things. (Cindy Sheehan takes notes at my gigs, but you don't have to.)

There are all kinds of people doing this kind of music. It's a very old tradition, around the world, in lots of different languages and musical genres. This kind of music can be very hard to find (even for regular listeners of Democracy Now! -- to say nothing of NPR, BBC or MTV). If you subscribe to the daily posts on my Song News Network Facebook Page (@songnewsnetwork on Twitter), you'll see that there are lots of people from around the world doing this kind of music -- many of them still living and touring, like me.

A lot of them are really affordable, too, and even do house concerts. I have a recipe on my website for how to organize a gig -- it applies to me or to other musicians on the DIY, grassroots circuit.

Whatever else you do, sitting at home and sulking is not going to help you or anyone else in the long run. If that's what you're up to these days, it's perfectly understandable. But when you get that out of your system, drop me a line, call all your friends and neighbors, and let's do something.

Wednesday, November 9, 2016

I was here in Portland, Oregon when Obama won in 2008. Me and my two-year-old daughter were hanging out in a pub, listening to our favorite local band (the Pagan Jug Band). The pub and the streets of Portland around it were full of celebration.

"We won!" some very enthusiastic, drunk guy with dreadlocks shouted too close to my sensitive ears.

Wanting to get away from the pandemonium, I carried Leila outside. A young man dressed in black, standing against the wall, looked like he felt as out-of-place as I did.

"Meanwhile in Afghanistan," he said.

At least there's one sensible anarchist among these very friendly but clueless hippies, I thought. It wouldn't take long before both of our suspicions of what had just happened were confirmed, as our new Black president appointed a team of rich, old white men to lead the US further down the road of neoliberalism and imperialism.

Fast forward eight years. Leila is ten now. Last night a friend and neighbor of hers here in Portland was having a little birthday party, and most of the parents were getting drunk on very good beer (Leila's friend's dad brews his own) and getting high on very good weed (another parent in the neighborhood grows some of Oregon's finest cannabis). And they were all looking shocked and confused, consulting those who were glued to their phones every minute or so for election updates.

For about 24 hours prior to this, my Facebook page was awash in hundreds of comments related to my prediction that Trump was going to win, and especially to a song and essay I wrote about how I didn't have any idea whether this outcome would be better or worse than the Democratic Party's alternative (of more Clintonian neoliberalism and imperialism). The comments were all over the map, but many of them expressed complete confidence that Hillary Clinton was going to win, and that she and her party represented the lesser evil.

Why were they all so sure Clinton was going to win? Well, there were a few who expressed their belief that the election was rigged and that the outcome was predetermined. (They were wrong, at least on the predetermined aspect. US democracy is very corrupt and extremely primitive, but it is an oligarchic pseudo-democracy, not a monarchic one.) Mostly, they were so sure she would win because they don't understand why so many people would vote for Trump.

Why were they so sure that Trump didn't have the widespread support he clearly has? Because these people live in a bubble. (Obviously.) What kind of bubble?

There are many aspects to this bubble, or these bubbles. Social media tends to be an echo chamber full of people who agree with you, more or less. I mean, it's all relative -- within a general agreement there can be lots of vitriolic disagreements. So my Facebook friends and Twitter followers include lots of people who agree with my general assessment of our two-party plutocracy (it's all shit). This group includes a diverse array of anarchists, socialists, and communists from throughout North America and northern Europe, primarily (not coincidentally, mainly people living in the countries where I tour a lot). And then there are a lot of people who believe the Democratic Party to be the lesser evil, particularly, it seems, in this most recent election. Among this group, my friends were divided between those capable of reasonable discourse, and pro-Clinton bullies, flinging largely baseless accusations at anyone who disagreed with them.

Among the hundreds of people commenting on Facebook (drawn from a total of around 10,000 friends and followers, mostly white men from the United States), not one person advocated for voting for Trump. This is the nature of social media, for better or for worse. It does not give us a clear vision of any kind of shared reality. It is, by nature, an echo chamber. (And sometimes echo chambers have great acoustics!)

If these folks were also getting their news from more traditional forms of corporate-controlled media (aside from corporate-controlled social media), as most of them probably were, then they would have been similarly out of luck. Most of the media that I listen to, watch and read, such as NPR, BBC, the Guardian, NY Times, etc., was virulently anti-Trump -- in a way that was different from media opposition to any prominent politician in my memory, aside from Bernie Sanders or Ralph Nader.

Personally, I felt so out of touch with what was going on in this country that I subscribed to Donald Trump's YouTube channel, and started listening to his speeches from beginning to end. Then it all made sense.

All I was ever getting on most corporate, public and community media to date had been the most incendiary quotes from the landlord of landlords from New York City. And to be sure, xenophobia and racism played a huge role in his campaign. But what I learned from listening to his speeches was that far from the way he was generally characterized as a flip-flopping madman spewing whatever bile happened to come out of his mouth on a given day, changing his positions with the wind, here was a guy who was staying on message -- and his message was very clearly classic National Socialism.

National Socialism is not a terribly coherent or one-size-fits-all ideology. It's flexible, depending on various circumstances. But Trump's version of National Socialism is consistent. It integrates nationalism with socialism -- that is, it can be hard to separate the nationalism from the socialism. We want to build a wall to keep out "illegal aliens" because they are "taking our jobs." That is, we protect our borders (nationalism) in order to lift ourselves up economically by not having this unfair competition represented by non-citizens (socialism, sort of). We want to Put America First (nationalism) in order to renegotiate trade deals so they're a good deal for American workers (socialism). We want to stop worrying about protecting Japan and South Korea, pull our troops out of there (an isolationist version of nationalism) in order to spend the savings from not maintaining a huge military presence there on infrastructure in the US (socialism). The working class -- yes, he frequently used the term that only Sanders dared to use, among leading Democrats -- had been forgotten, and would be forgotten no longer.

These were the sorts of messages he was hammering home day in and day out, to massive crowds throughout the country. During Bernie Sanders' primary campaign -- which he lost largely because of the DNC's rigged super-delegate system -- he was also attracting huge crowds, hammering home messaging on similar themes, minus the nationalist, racist, xenophobic elements. But the messages about a fairer system where politicians are not bought and sold by corporations, opposed to TPP, etc., were basically the same. And the messaging from the media -- that Sanders and Trump were both idealists without any practical proposals, was also the same.

Sanders lost. Trump won. Socialism failed -- not due to a lack of popularity, but due to a rigged system. The National Socialist won -- voted in by many of the same people who would otherwise have voted for Sanders. There's a lot of history in the world with this phenomenon.

For many of those people who could have gone either way with these two candidates, it seems abundantly clear to me that what they were voting for was for a fairer system that's not rigged by plutocrats. One of the reasons the polls were wrong and I was right was because there were lots of people who didn't want to admit to pollsters that they were going to vote for Trump. Because they were shy about their support for him -- because they didn't want people to think they were crazy, since the media was portraying his supporters as being a collection of racist, sexist lunatics.

Here's one thing I don't want to do over the next years: I don't want to spend my time insulting Donald Trump or his supporters. I want to be part of building an internationalist, socialist movement that can be more popular than the Trump phenomenon. I don't believe this movement can or will come from the Democratic Party, since the leadership of this party abandoned the working class in favor of dividing our society into various interest groups, devoid of any awareness of the basic, class-divided nature of this country.

What I know for sure, wherever this movement might come from, is that the road forward does not involve pitting educated urban liberals against the semi-employed denizens of the countryside and the exurbs -- or writing them all off as racists who don't know their ass from their elbow. The road forward involves recognizing the socialism in National Socialism, and appealing to that aspect of Trump's message -- while also communicating effectively about how many aspects of nationalism (and racism, sexism and xenophobia) are actually inconsistent with socialism.

Tuesday, November 8, 2016

I've just been called a privileged white male repeatedly in the past few hours, by privileged white men and women who say I'm [insert expletive of your choice] for saying that the two parties, and their leadership and their presidential candidates are indistinguishably as evil as each other, as far as I can tell.

It started with posting this little rhyme on Facebook and Twitter:

I just see two evil peoplePutting on a puppet showIf one of them is lesserI certainly don't know

What followed almost immediately were dozens of shares and dozens of comments. A mix of praise, polite disagreement, and lots of vitriol from outraged white people, both men and women, accusing me of not caring about who wins this farcical election because I am a privileged white male and therefore will evidently be less impacted by the rise of fascism in the US that a Trump presidency is going to usher in. Along with that kind of sentiment were what appeared to be Democratic Party talking points related to the right to abortion and the rights of LGBTQ people, Supreme Court appointments, and random things like the importance of sticking with climate treaties and keeping our national parks.

I think everything has been said about these things already so many times by so many people. (Most eloquently on Counterpunch.) But I wanted to show some respect for my critics by responding thoughtfully to you, in a (hopefully) coherent, multi-paragraph kind of explanation, rather than continuing the discussion on Facebook, which has a tendency to devolve into something less than intelligent discourse after the first couple exchanges (or sooner).

First of all, one thing that distresses me about these comments from some of my Facebook Friends (many of whom I've actually met in person at least once or twice) is the inherent nationalism.

When they talk about the rights of women, the right to an abortion, and discrimination against LGBTQ people, they are talking about the United States. Why does this bother me? Because whoever runs the United States is not just president of one of the world's biggest countries. They are someone who will have a horribly negative impact on the rest of the world, too. They are people who are going to kill lots and lots of women, men and children. Including LGBTQ ones. They are people who are going to be cozy with misogynistic dictatorships, where women don't have access to abortions, where it's illegal to be LGBT or Q, such as Saudi Arabia.

We live in an empire. I feel like I need to say that again. We live in an empire. Do you have any idea what that means, you who say I don't care because I'm too white, male, and privileged to give a shit about other people?

Do you know what Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, George W Bush, and George HW Bush all have in common? They are all mass murderers. Collectively, they have killed millions and millions of people, and immiserated billions.

Daddy Bush bombed Iraq and killed hundreds of thousands of people in a matter of weeks. Bill Clinton maintained economic sanctions on the country that killed hundreds of thousands more than Bush had killed with bombs and sanctions before him. Madeline Albright, that great feminist, was one of the great brains behind this policy, which UNICEF said was responsible for killing half a million children. Most of whom were girls. Many of whom would have grown up to be lesbians, bisexuals, trans, etc. And under the government the bipartisan US invaders violently overthrew, the women among them, if they had lived to become women, would have had access to all the abortions they ever needed -- for free. But no more. Now they're dead, and living in societies with no functional governments and no government services to speak of.

Then of course W built upon the Bush/Clinton legacy of genocide -- fratricide, matricide, patricide, sororicide (yes, that's a word) -- by invading Iraq more completely and actually overthrowing the government. And Hillary Clinton voted for this invasion. And then, under the Obama administration, in which Hillary Clinton played a powerful role as Secretary of State, the US did to Libya what it had done to Iraq, with the same, predictably horrible results.

The lives of Iraqi and Libyan women, girls, men, boys, and everybody else is immeasurably worse now than it was before the Bush-Clinton-Bush-Obama decades of genocidal empire-building. Do they matter? Do all of those women and girls who are living in crowded, miserable refugee camps throughout the Middle East matter? When they need to get an abortion, do they matter? When they are denied an education by their deplorable circumstances, after being born in countries like Iraq and Libya where they used to get free education up to graduate school, do they matter to you?

You are telling me to vote for a mass murderer. You are voting for a mass murderer. How do you feel about that?

Ah, but Trump is worse, so I'm a crazy idealist for stating the facts here. I should be talking up whatever few positive things I can find to say about Hillary Clinton. Hey, she's never opposed abortion! Well, she used to oppose marriage equality, like most of her party, like most of the other party, but now she's changed on that. As has much of the other party, too, but we won't mention that. We'll only mention the crazier elements of the other party, in order to build this straw man here. Wow, it burns really well! Especially when you add a little Democratic fracking gas.

Anyway, back to my critics. So Clinton has a record of genocide. Let's just say that that's true (because it is). But Trump, who has no record of genocide, is worse. How do we know that? Because, although Hillary Clinton has presided over the deportations of millions of people from Mexico, Central America, and elsewhere, Trump talks about how much he hates Mexicans. And who knows what he'll do when he gets in -- maybe deport even more people than Obama/Clinton did! So, the lesser evil is the one who has actually deported more people than any other administration in US history. The greater evil is the one who talks about deporting even more people. That's the discourse, right?

But I say talk is cheap. Yeah, maybe Trump will be even worse than Clinton. I don't know -- you don't, either. Nobody does. He has no political record to stand on. He does talk a lot of horrible shit, that's for sure. Clinton talks horrible shit about him, but otherwise talks about unity, whatever the fuck that's supposed to mean -- "stronger together." She has presided over the greatest destruction of the welfare state that any society has ever known, aside from the ones she's been involved with invading, where the destruction of better welfare states than we've ever had has been even more complete than what the Clinton welfare reform accomplished at home (yes, she was promoting it -- it's hers, too). She has been responsible for sending millions and millions of Black and Brown people (and lots of white people, too) to prison. Including more women than have ever been imprisoned in any society in the history of humanity. But she talks a good line in order to get elected, and Trump talks shit about everybody who's not white and male and rightwing, so she must be better than him.

Both candidates are surrounding themselves with the traditional cabal of capitalists and empire-builders, just as Obama did before them, just as Bush and Clinton did before him. But we're supposed to see differences here.

OK, so let's just say the rest of the world doesn't matter. Who cares about all those Iraqi and Libyan women and girls. The Republicans are going to ban abortion in the United States. Never mind the fact that after eight years of Bush, Jr, four years of Daddy Bush, and eight years of Reagan, abortion is still legal in the United States, at least on a federal level. Never mind the fact that a Republican was president when abortion was legalized by a Supreme Court that was largely appointed by previous Republican presidents. Fear the Republicans, those who would ban abortion (someday, maybe, when they're finally ready to lose control of the Congress and never get it back).

But it doesn't work that way in reality. In reality, we don't have a functional democracy (in case you hadn't noticed). In reality, elections don't change things in this country. In other countries they do. Not here. Here in the USA we have a form of direct corporate rule, and Trump and Clinton and their parties are just two sides of this two-faced coin.

Abortion was legalized because of the feminist movement here and around the world. It would have happened regardless of which party was in power, just as it did around the same time in lots of other countries. Abortion will not be banned nationally because most people are pro-choice, and there would be a massive, militant movement to re-legalize it if it were banned, and the powers-that-be don't want such movements, so they won't do that. They'll talk about it, in parts of the country where that sells well, because it will help get them elected. Then they'll stab their Christian evangelical constituency in the back, just as Hillary has repeatedly stabbed her liberal constituency in the back.

When you have a two-party system where both parties are corrupt institutions of a tiny elite, elections are just a joke. It doesn't matter which of these clowns you vote for -- or if it does matter, nobody knows to what extent it might, because what matters is what they do, not what they say. And what they do, historically, depends on what we do -- not how we vote.

To wit: nobody voted to end slavery. Slaves liberated themselves en masse in the course of the Civil War, and were then declared to be "free" by a government which happened to be led by a Republican. After that, the party of white supremacy -- the Democratic Party -- ruled the South and much of the rest of the US for a century.

No Democrat or Republican in the White House or the Congress was voted in that caused the US to get things like minimum wage laws, Social Security, workplace safety laws, etc. -- these things were won by the labor movement. During the Depression, when faced with the very real possibility of a mass, armed revolt, the labor movement had a sympathizer in the White House. He was also a racist who supported the killing of hundreds of thousands of women and girls and others in Japan, Germany and elsewhere. He interned thousands of children in camps in the United States. He was a Democrat.

What about all these homeless women and girls in this country, living in tents after losing their homes because of the Great Financial Crisis that began at the end of the Bush years? Which itself was a direct result of Bill Clinton's deregulation of the financial sector. After eight years of Obama and Clinton ruling the country, did any bankers go to prison for that? Have the people living in tents been given houses? No? Not even the women or LGBTQ or Black or Brown tent-dwellers? But now you expect something different?

Ah, but Trump is a racist and a misogynist and will lower taxes on the rich. Did you know that taxes on the rich were much higher under Reagan and every previous administration, Republican and Democratic, going back decades before him? This is not because of who we voted for. This was because of the times. There were social movements back then, demanding rights. There was a post-WWII consensus here and in many other countries that temporarily gave working class people some modicum of dignity under the law. No longer. By bipartisan consensus in the early 1970's, as the 1960's social movements were fizzling out or being killed off or imprisoned (or all of the above and more), that all started to change.

But hey, what do I know. I'm a privileged white male. And, according to some of you on Facebook, I am therefore voting (and presumably acting in life in general) out of this identity. Wow -- that's the hardest bullshit to counter of all, because it's so crazy. Has identity politics devolved to the point where now we think everybody is only acting out of their own self interest? Is there not even the concept of solidarity in existence among this sorry collection of confused people anymore? Is there no way to identify oneself except by race, gender and sexual orientation anymore? Does nothing else matter?

When Hitler came to power, the first thing he did was arrest lots and lots of white people -- men and women. They were called communists. Many of them, in fact, were communists. Communism was and is a political philosophy. You can be a communist no matter what your race, gender or sexual orientation is. And if a government comes to power that feels threatened by this historically potent political philosophy, you can be arrested, tortured and killed for being a communist. Lots of people around the world have been arrested, tortured and killed for being communists. Most of them were not white. A very large percentage of them were women. In Germany they were mostly white. (By the modern US definition of whiteness, anyway, which includes Jews, I think. But most of them were even whiter than that.)

Of course, maybe Trump will only arrest the nonwhite, female, or LGBTQ communists. Maybe he'll blow up the world. Maybe Clinton will. Maybe they both will. I don't know and I know that you don't, either (even Michael Moore and Bruce Springsteen don't know). You can make whatever assumptions you want to make, and I'll make mine.

But here's one thing I know, which my critics obviously don't: we live in an evil, capitalist empire, led by evil capitalists like Trump, and their surrogates, like Clinton. We will never get anywhere by voting for evil people. We need a mass movement, which, historically, is the only thing that has caused lasting change to occur in this country, aside from global events such as the rise of the Soviet Union. Democracy is in the streets. Literally. I voted for a woman named Jill Stein and a man named Ahjamu Baraka. Not because I think this or any other national US election particularly matters, but because it only takes a few minutes to fill out a ballot and stick in the mail, and there were some local people worth voting for who might actually get into Portland City Council, which is currently run by "liberal" Democratic pawns of capitalist real estate developers, like so many other US cities.

Now I will get on with more important business of attempting to play my small role in fomenting the kind of movement that we need, to oppose the capitalist empire-builder who occupies the White House now, and who will be occupying the White House on January 21st, 2017. Whoever he or she may be.